Nana's Vibrator:For god's sake, just send back the same exact message we received so they'll know we're just as smart as they...were in ...1977. Asshole Tweeting scientists.Just do that music from Close Encounters; or the hockey fight scene from Strange Brew.

Sticky Hands:How will they even know?for all we know "suck my saggy old balls" is alien speak for "very pleased to meet you"heck, it sometimes means that here.

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

downstairs:CruJones: Is that actually true? Is there a legitimate reason another being wouldn't have math using a base 7? I thought we only used base 10 because we have 10 fingers. Would they still understand it?

/seriously//used to be good at math, long time ago

Any advanced species would be able to figure out the base of said math pretty easily if we sent along enough information.

I mean, humans can read hexidecimal pretty easily without a calculator or computer.

Ok, everything I see always assumes aliens would be using base 10 as well, and that's what we're looking for. I really couldn't remember the reasoning, I haven't used much math in 20 years-ish without a calculator/computer.